We are the victims of identity theft. Someone got ahold of the card number and other info from my bank debit card and charged $3,000 worth of stuff yesterday before I canceled the card. I caught it right away. I look at that account every day because it gets deposits from paypal MailSteward sales. Candace has been on the phone constantly calling all of the merchants that were charged and trying to get them to cancel the orders. Some will, some won’t.
In the process she also found three different merchants who all said that the goods were being shipped to 812 N Arapahoe St. in Amarillo, TX. So she also called the Amarillo police dept. a number of times, and dragged me to the cop shop in Murfreesboro to file a police report. The nice cop who filled out our report said that this was the sixth such report filed this month. He asked if we had shopped at TJ Max recently. We had. And so had all the other people who had filed reports. TJ Max had a hacker break-in recently and thousands of credit card numbers got stolen, many of them in Tennessee. The cop informed us that there was very little likelihood that Amarillo was going to stake out that address and bust the guy.
The process of dealing with all this has been a learning experience. If you have a few numbers, which you can buy on the street for about $50 apiece, it is easy to buy stuff online, ship it overnight to the address of an empty house or building, fence it through e-bay, and never get caught. The thing is, if you are internet-savvy, and have police powers, and good communications between police departments, it is equally easy to track down and bust these guys, by just sitting in front of a computer, if you’re quick about it. But they don’t do that of course. The Murfreesboro cop just kept shaking his head and saying that they’re gonna have to do something about this pretty soon, it’s just gettin’ out of hand.
Hacking into TJ Max is the hard way. Any store or restaurant that processes credit cards gives minimum wage workers access to all of your credit card info except your address, which is easily found online for many people, certainly for me. This is just gonna get worse until we have a national identity card and retina or fingerprint verification everywhere, including attached to your personal computer. I, for one, welcome these intrusions into my privacy, now that I no longer have criminal or politically radical tendencies.